Forty Five
by Dachau
Summary: In which a British soldier and a German nurse find companionship in each other, during the worst of times to be either.


German Devils. They were always German Devils, Reno noticed. No one ever had anything good to say about them. No one he knew, anyway. And yet he was sure, away from all the action, people there walked down the street the same as anywhere else, feigning obliviousness and pretending this war was over. He was sure they weren't all in league with Adolf, teaching their children his deadly principles as people liked to pretend. But in all honesty, he would rather them have been devils.

He would rather they be a nation of bullies, endlessly striving toward expansion and invasion.

He would rather their children all be spoiled brats, torturing their Jewish neighbors just for being different.

For his own sanity, he would rather folks just be evil in Germany, so he wouldn't feel anything at all while he went on dropping bombs in their backyards.

Duty; it was all about his duty. To his country, mainly. Britain, he was told. Saviors. Saviors, they were, fighting the goodfight and all that. In all honesty, he couldn't care much less about this war. But he loved to fly, so he'd do it under the allowance of whomever he could. He was just Reno. And also, a British Bomber Pilot.

That label hung heavily from his chest. That symbol burned itself through his clothing until it had branded across his heart like a scarlet letter, both a medal and a wound. Something to be proud of and something to fear. Oh, how his family loved to talk, his mother especially. She was even prouder of him than he was, come to think of it. She liked to talk about the good he was doing, how he was a knight of the good of the nation, the world even, how he was honorable and may the good Lord bless him on his mission.

Yes, the good Lord, may he bless me as I blow away playgrounds and shelters and small towns with starving children.

It depended heavily on who he was asking, he supposed. He imagined himself looking into the eyes of a small girl, blonde hair and blue eyes. She'd cock her head to one side and ask, "Do I look like a monster to you?" The girl's mother would say, no, no, she's just a girl; but his mother would affirm, yes, yes, she's on her way, Hitler Youth, Hitler Youth, Bund Deutscher Madchen, Bund Deutscher Madchen. His mind tended to cling more to one side than the other.

British Bomber Pilot. British Bomber Pilot. _Strafbomber. Strafbomber. Strafbomber._

And on the other end on the world, Axel Freud did not really exist. In that hospital, he was Nurse Freud, nothing more.

All indications of character were to be restrained, hidden at all times, in and out of the clinic. While he was on duty, it was not his place to make friends or to save souls, he was there to keep things neat and clean and that was his only jurisdiction. He folded his blankets with the labels facing up and he organized medications by name and dosage. He dedicated his life to these things—small, but neither trivial nor unnecessary. He pledged himself a tool for saving lives and healing bodies, not soothing spirits and calming nerves.

"Something's happened."

Something about those words…he had been around all those bases, but those words from the other girls sent chills down his spine. He volunteered for an extra shift then, something he'd never done before then.

He was a nurse, not a politician. He didn't care who won the war, to what end, for what cause; he just wanted it to end. Or, more accurately, he wanted more morphine.

More and more troops every day, all kinds of faces and all with different tongues, people unable to tell him what hurt and what didn't, people who would never walk again, people unable to open their eyes for even a moment, people who would never open them ever again. Supplies were low, and Nurse Freud tried his best to save as many people as he could. But the longer he worked, the more he was sucked into his own morbidity, the realization that he might be doing the Devil's work after all, that he wasn't saving anywhere near the number he could if he only had more supplies, dammit.

The other nurses were far more plastic than he—they blended in so well to the atmosphere of the shaking clinic. Somehow, every man who'd made a recovery could pick him out from a distance, and could call out to him by name. It was long since his proctor, Sister Anna, had ordered him to bundle up his bright hair, but there was nothing he could do about the scars, two deep gashes in his face that he no longer remembered where or how came about. They got him many a strange look from the other girls, all earthly colored and quiet, and isolated him as some kind of pariah in his practice.

But none of that mattered. He was a nurse. He was not a politician. He was not a housewife or a homemaker. Not yet.

Axel had, in the last year working at the clinic, found himself somehow engaged with one of three surgeons in the building, Tseng Kaplan. A Turkish man, he was also Jewish, a dangerous, dangerous, rare kind of man with a lovely, safe profession. As long as he slaved over gurneys and tables, repairing German soldiers to send back out to the front, he remained surprisingly untouched and unthreatened by the Party. That they somehow managed to overlook him was a popular joke around the clinic, but Axel wasn't buying any of it.

They had been together for a good eight months now, and Axel, who was not a terrible romantic, nor clingy, nor did he have a strong libido, was vying for this man's touch. But they were busy, always busy, Axel was in habit of hearing.

Axel liked to think he was in love with a coward, but such thoughts soon faded behind another desperate cry for _morphine, morphine, we need more morphine, Tseng, please, can't you work something out with Steiner?_

_Please. The morphine._

_The morphine._

_Our patients are dying Tseng they're dying can't you do something has to be done about anything I'll take anything at this point yes yes please try try harder doesn't it even matter to you don't I matter to you what about me me me don't I matter I matter at all Tseng? Tseng?_

* * *

><p>It was still kind of fuzzy, what actually happened that night. He remembered being told, with the rest of the team, his mission. And Dresden, he remembered that, too, and taking off, he always remembered taking off. But that was as far as his memory went.<p>

He could recall some things, bits and pieces, as he laid in that filthy cot, surrounded by moans of pain and heavy breathing, followed by a few howls of agony that usually presented themselves in a wartime clinic. His coat, he remembered. He'd cut the labels out. He'd cut them from every article of clothing he could, and discarded what he couldn't. His shoes, for example, were sitting inside some cool shack at the moment, frozen stiff with the cold.

He wiggled his toes a moment and found them bare, if not for a pair of soaking wet socks. It was December. Where were his shoes, again? Why wasn't he wearing them? His head swam and throbbed, and for a moment he decided to stop thinking. On discovering he couldn't just stop thinking, Reno sat up from his cot and took a long, insightful look around.

Bodies were lined up everywhere, most of them alive, though barely. A thin walkway had been improvised to move about the rows of gurneys, but the clinic was packed wall to wall on both sides, in the hallways, by the stairs, on the stairs. Everywhere they had room, they set a bed. Seven or eight nurses moved swiftly around the floor, in and out of his sight in seconds sometimes, on one mission one second, another the next. Bedpans, bandages, syringes, scopes; boom boom boom, and they moved hella quick, too, at this bed, at that one, boom boom, done, next, done, next, done.

He thought he might puke and hunched over briefly, grasping at his stomach.

He felt the bandages, the gauze rubbing at his calloused fingers. Wounded? He prodded at it and cringed at the sting. He really might puke. And again, boom, a nurse was there at his bedside, holding out a bedpan over his lap and looking up at him with patient, but not too-patient eyes, waiting for him to lurch and he better do it quick. She wasn't here to console him away from the point of nausea, only to be there to prevent a mess. _Cleanliness is next to godliness,_ Reno thought as he watched the nurse, no older than seventeen, but maybe eighteen, carry his tray of bile toward the back of the hospital without a second glance or a sickened grimace.

He settled back in on his cot thinking, _what a strange woman._

But the longer he sat there, looking around, the more he realized that this was the standard. This was what was expected of them, what they'd grown used to, what they did every day, every hour, every minute or so, cleaning up waste like it were beverage spills, dipping their hands into offensive chemicals and carrying putrid tools of gore and dissection.

It was all incredibly morbid. Little girls, sister, daughters, more familiar with the concept of macabre than the average soldier, but couldn't be bothered enough to care. He laughed at himself, ignoring the stab of pain in his belly. Funny, it was all so fucking funny all of a sudden. Soon, it was well after hours and he was still laughing, while most of the patients were lulled into a drug-induced sleep, most of the nurses retiring for the night. He barked out loudly, and no one nurse turned, no soldier woke, and for a moment he was anonymous, invisible, and nonexistent.

But the invisible can see the invisible, and so the nonexistent can notice the nonexistent.

Another nurse watched him from the corner of his eye, unable to keep a straight face like his kin, and Reno caught his glance, not ceasing his laughter. He must have raised some flags of concern because the nurse wandered over, his brow furrowing even more, betraying him more than he knew. Reno could already tell he was different, that he didn't have a place among fearless girls and dead-inside doctors.

Then, the man in the cot beside him coughed.

It was a pitiful noise, a small, stifled one, and had he not been so locked in eye contact with the other nurse, so blindly focused, so aware of everything around him, he might not have noticed. But he did notice, and the nurse noticed, and they both turned to look at him.

He wore a French uniform, his face pale, his chin covered in light stubble. He wore a head wrap of bandages, a thick layer of yellowish gauze and tape, eyes sunken, turned up to the ceiling as he stared at nothing in particular.

Reno stopped laughing.

The nurse stopped walking. And then, he resumed, forgetting entirely about him and advancing on the Frenchman with a light, careful step and a soft, soft face. Very carefully, the nurse sat at the man's bedside, on his cot, just by his thigh, hand lightly descending onto his, fingers curling around the man's clammy palm.

Almost immediately, the man turned to look at him with such a raw form of desperation, Reno thought for a moment that he might never smile again. And all at once, the soldier's eyes locked onto the nurse's as his had a moment before, and the man began to sob quietly, just a huff here and there, a blubber and a breath.

Even quieter, the nurse hushed him gently like a genuine German Devil, luring the man into his arms with promises of rest where there would be only suffering. Reno always thought their language was so ugly, but on this man's tongue, it was beautiful.

The man's blubbering did not cease, and the nurse picked up another tongue, just like that, cooing out in French: "_Je suis ici, I'm here. I'm here."_

He took a folded cloth from his bundle and pressed it gently to the man's forehead, to the sweat congealing in the folds of his brow, all turned up in anguish. The smile he wore was sweet but entirely too fake to fool the crying man underneath him. But that didn't seem to bother him much.

Nothing could bother him anymore.

The man continued to snivel. His eyes were reduced to the insignificant glances of children. _"You _are_ here..."_ He rasped, his throat forcing out another few coughs, voice ragged from disuse.

_"Because you called,"_ the nurse said, continuing to dab. _"What's your name?"_

The man hesitated. His voice shook. His hand trembled under the nurse's touch. _"Bohm. And you?"_

_"…Nurse Freud."_

_"No, your…"_ he took a breath, stifling another cough. It shuddered back down his windpipe. With a gulp, he continued. _"…name."_

_"Freud,"_ the nurse said again, stubbornly insistent._ "It's Freud."_

_"…Freud."_ He took it, no complaints._ "Cute."_

In that moment, the man twisted up in pain, his back rising from the cot, his head thrown back into his pillow as he grunted. His eyes stayed on the nurse, trembling. _"Please,"_ he begged, tearful. _"Please loosen these bandages. They are so very tight."_

With slight hesitation, the nurse stood with a frown and, with practiced precision, began to unwind the wrap. As he moved, the man continued to talk. Just talking to talk. Reno, who could only pick up a word here and there, slowly began to understand what the man needed.

_"You remember my sister? Always playing that damn piano. Something by Haydn, I think."_

He began to hum, nodding his head into the nurse's palm.

_"What did you think of her playing?"_

The nurse peeled away the last layer of gauze to reveal a section of bone missing from his skull. His brain stared back at them, bloody and boding and bursting with infection.

_"…beautiful."_ The nurse whispered, starting a drift of cynicism in the air, the ominous foreboding of what was to come for them. He carefully folded the bandage back into place. _"The most beautiful music I've heard."_

The man swallowed heavily. His skin and dry eyes just shimmering pitifully.

_"My mother is very fond of you,"_ he began. His voice was much quieter now, his face dark and bleak, anguished, missing something he was anxious to reclaim. _"We should marry."_

_"Yes."_ The nurse looked away from his head and began to replace the bandages, looser, with barely any hold. Who cared about keeping it in? Comfort is what mattered. Comfort was all that mattered now.

_"Sometime in the summer,"_ he continued, smiling barely. Happy. Happy. _"July. Around your birthday."_

_"Yes."_

The man laughed and the nurse joined him, though half-heartedly. For a while, they laughed like that, and afterwards grew silent. The man looked up with searching eyes, another tear dragging in the corner of his eyes.

_"Do you love me?"_

_"Yes,"_ the nurse replied without a pause.

And again, they were silent. The man stared up at the nurse like he everything, like he was his whole world, and Reno was sure, at that moment, he was.

_"I'm frightened."_ The man sobbed. _"I'm frightened, Freud."_

The nurse leaned forward to caress the man's forehead with his hand, skin to skin, a tender, sincere smile on his face.

_"My name is Axel."_

And the man died. Right then, right there, the moment passing like the light out of his eyes. Reno noted that, even as he was the only one keeping it, the nurse never once broke eye contact as he passed.

For a long while the nurse looked at his form as if he were sleeping, his thumb still rubbing circles into the skin above his eyebrow. Then his wits returned to him, as he pulled the sheets up over the man's head and turned to gather his things. He reached for the bell that hung loosely from the man's bedside and rung it three times, loudly.

Everything that had once been quiet, murmurs, whispers, coughs or turnings, died away. Hushed, they looked to them. A man was dead. There was his body.

And there was Reno who seemed the third party in the conversation between the soldier and the nurse, his body stiff and frozen, mind working harder than it ever had before, trying to puzzle everything out, trying to fit things into categories, boxes, spaces, and finding that no matter how hard he tried, it was just something that couldn't be shoved into the corner with the rest of his useless, useless memories. So naturally, it remained in the forefront.

Nothing he had ever done in his life ever amounted to anything like what Nurse Freud had done for that man in the cot beside him.

Nothing he could ever do could ever make such a difference.

To tell a dying man the one thing in the world he wanted to hear when it mattered most, Reno had fallen for the nurse in that instant, utterly and completely, unquestionably smitten.

Nurse Freud. Axel.

Axel Freud, Nurse.

His tray was filled with various antibiotics and gauzes, his hands sterilized and new gloves pulled upon them. As he turned to leave, Reno caught his eye and stared up at him with all the hope and love of a new puppy to his owner.

Considering what they had just been through, it reeled him back in like a magnet.

The nurse hesitated, mouth open with unspoken words just waiting on the edge of his lips. _"Was hast du…?"_ He whispered, his own voice trembling with sorrow. Reno recognized the tone.

Nurse Freud wanted to be alone.

Nurse Freud wanted to cry.

The words he could not understand echoed in his mind. He longed to hear English from that mouth, but knew he could not be as fortunate as the Frenchman had.

The nurse showed slight signs of annoyance at his lack of reply, but did not voice his concerns. His back lurched and his gaze darted rapidly from the floor to Reno's face before he set the tray down at the feet of the dead man's bed, and Reno read his mind. He was wasting so much time, on just two patients. The Sister would have his head for this.

Reno shivered at the scrape of a stool being dragged across the stone floor to his bedside and felt the heat of the body beside him as it took a seat by his thigh next. Slowly, the nurse reached across his bed, took Reno's arm–which he'd barely noticed had been cradling his abdomen—and moved it away. Sure enough, there was a small dabble of blood on the lower left side of his belly, poking out from the underside of the bandage. It had dried in the fabric; the wound was a few days old.

Memories returned in a steady flood; the enemy's interception, the battle in the storm clouds, following by the ejection of more than a few of his team's seats. He'd floated down to earth with some of his friends, he and his friends being shot at by some German civilians with pistols that became hostile towards their uniforms. Both Louis and Jack were dead before they landed and a bullet had already ripped clear through Reno's side; he barely had enough time to limp to safety as the rest of his comrades were overwhelmed.

Just outside the city, Reno slept in a small tool shack of some rural family until dawn, where he left his English shoes as the only pieces of evidence of his survival, sliced off his labels, and walked into the snowy streets with nothing but a pair of socks on his feet. He collapsed before he'd been able to make it too far, and someone must have brought him to the clinic.

Reno laid his head back against the pillow and bit his lip as the fabric of his coat was peeled away from his flesh and the wound exposed. The nurse gently prodded at the wound. Reno lurched and resisted crying out.

_"Ah, eine Schusswunde. Aber es hat durch gemacht,"_ said the nurse. _"Gut."_

The nurse reached for his tray and Reno dismayed to find that he picked up not only the antibiotics to prevent infection and a roll of gauze and bandages, but a reel of fishing line, a lighter and a needle.

He also thought, Fishing line, huh? Must be at a loss for resources.

After the cleaning and preparation, the nurse flashed him a shaky smile, as if to say, "Ready?"

Reno nodded, and bit down on the piece of cloth that was provided to him.

Afterwards, feeling weary and abused and halfway to Death's doorstep himself, Reno returned to the living to find a hand tightly clutching his.

_"Ihr wirst leben."_

And then he was gone, whisking through a maze of cots and bedpans to the other end of the hospital.

Reno watched him go, barely feeling the burn of the needle compared to the burn of where the nurse had touched him. He closed his fist tightly in his own sheet. Amidst a field of enemies, he slept wholeheartedly.

German Devils. He thought.

German Devils, after all.


End file.
